Happy Birthday Temari!
Disclaimer: I'm not repeating it for the twenty-first time this story. If you really want to read a disclaimer, you can find one in just about every chapter of every story on fanfiction.
When Temari rose, wandering out of her room and heading down the hallway, rubbing sleep from her eyes, she was greeted by a pair of arms encircling her waist from behind. A kiss was placed on the back of her neck, and a whispered "Happy birthday, Temari" reached her ear.
"Mhmm." She turned in his hold to embrace him back. "Thanks, Shika."
He kissed the tip of her nose. "You look cute when you're sleepy."
"Does that mean I'm not cute when I'm awake?" she asked in mock-horror.
Shikamaru chuckled. "You know that's not what I meant. You're always cute, and I wouldn't trade you for anybody."
Temari nuzzled his shoulder with her nose. "I wouldn't trade you in, either."
After a few minutes of cuddling, Temari reluctantly broke away. "I suppose I had better get ready. I've got a meeting today."
"They couldn't even give you your birthday off?"
She shrugged. "An ambassador's work is never done." She wasn't going to tell him why this meeting was special. She didn't want to get his hopes up if it didn't work out.
A few minutes after she left, Shikamaru opened the door; he needed to pick up a few things. Or maybe more than just a few things, he decided, looking at the list in his hand:
Sugar
Flour
Eggs
Butter
Vanilla
Baking powder
Milk
Salt
Flowers
Necklace
He headed first for the specialty weapons store. Even though it was still early in the morning, the shop was already doing good business, and Shikamaru had to wait a few minutes in line, trying not to fall asleep in boredom. When he finally reached the counter, the owner pulled out a small box, and Shikamaru opened it, examining the necklace carefully from all angles. Satisfied, he tucked it in his pocket and headed for the market, choosing groceries almost mechanically. When he finished buying the ingredients for the cake, he realized that he didn't have any hands free to carry flowers in. He would have to go back, drop the groceries off, and come back for the flowers. What a drag.
Returning with the flowers, he set them carefully on the table before taking out a cookbook. It couldn't be that hard to bake a cake, could it? There were only six steps. Confidently, he read the first instruction: In a medium bowl, cream together the sugar and butter. Cream, how did that work as a verb? It must mean mix sugar, butter and cream together, Shikamaru decided. But it didn't say how much cream to add, so Shikamaru poured it in the bowl until it formed a moat around the mountain of sugar and butter in the middle.
Okay, so step two: Beat in the eggs, one at a time. Beat the eggs. What did that mean, exactly? He finally decided he would just attack the eggs with a spoon for a while. But he didn't crack the eggs first. How was he supposed to know to do so? It didn't way anywhere in the directions to remove the eggshells first.
So on to step three: then stir in the vanilla. That he could do. But what did tsp. stand for? Shrugging, Shikamaru poured the whole bottle in.
Step four: Combine flour, salt and baking powder, add to the creamed mixture and mix well. There was the stupid tsp. abbreviation next to the baking powder. He decided to add about 1 vanilla bottle's worth of baking powder, then the powder would be proportional to the vanilla.
Okay, final step before baking: stir in milk and pour batter into pan. The mixture looked kind of funny when he was done, but he shrugged it off. He didn't bake cakes normally, so maybe this was what cake batter was supposed to look like.
Finally: Bake for 25 minutes. He slid the pan into the oven and sat back to wait. His eyelids slid closed, ever so slowly …
Temari's going to get quite the birthday surprise. I will try to get the other half of the birthday excitement up tomorrow.